Guadalupe County exec drawing praise, brickbats over landfills

Guadalupe County Judge Larry Jones has won both cheers and jeers over his landfill negotiations.

Guadalupe County banked a check last week for $88,647, the long-awaited first payment from a deal it struck in 2007 with Waste Management Inc. that helped expand a landfill — and County Judge Larry Jones has proudly claimed credit for it even as he faces a cascade of criticism for negotiating over a different landfill.

“I took on a multinational company who told me no,” Jones said.

The county had agreed to stop fighting the firm's attempt to enlarge its Mesquite Creek Landfill outside New Braunfels, from 79 acres in neighboring Comal County to 164 acres extending into Guadalupe County, in exchange for a 4 percent cut of dumping fees collected there.

But the contract stipulated the payments wouldn't start until the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued a final permit to enlarge the landfill, which can't happen while a lawsuit is pending by opponents.

Jones wasn't part of those negotiations — he was elected in 2012 and will leave office in December. But a Waste Management spokeswoman acknowledged that Jones persuaded the firm last fall to start the payments this year.

The 2007 agreement was modeled on deals Comal County and New Braunfels had struck with Waste Management that let them split a tipping fee of 7.5 percent from the site. The company halted those payments last fall after it stopped depositing waste in the Comal County section of the dump.

While Jones has won praise for getting the funds flowing to Guadalupe County, he's under fire for pursuing a similar agreement with the would-be operators of a new landfill planned east of Seguin.

Opponents of the Post Oak Clean Green Inc. landfill were outraged to learn last month that Jones had been negotiating with the firm and had quietly written to the TCEQ to support its permit application — despite the county's formal opposition to it.

At a March 31 county commissioners meeting, Jones argued that the county should cut a deal to benefit from an outcome he called inevitable.

“There's only two options out there ... a permit without any fees or a permit with millions of dollars in fees,” he said. “That's the reason for the (TCEQ) letter. It's all about money.”

But Jones denied he talked with Post Oak officials — until photos emerged showing him and Tom Funderburg, president of Post Oak, at a New Braunfels restaurant the day before the meeting. Jones later said he'd misspoken and admitted the two had met several times.

Resident Regina Franke, who snapped the photos, said in an email that carried them to a county commissioner, “I am not sure what, if anything, can be done about him and his lies and shenanigans.”

Commissioner Kyle Kutscher, who beat Jones in the Republican primary for county judge, faulted him for acting alone on a major issue.

“It's not what he does most of the time that's upsetting, it's how he goes about it,” Kutscher said. “He's going to say one thing and do another.”

Jones shouldn't be faulted for reaching out to Funderburg, given the precedent set by the county with Waste Management, said Jan Koehne, who fought the Mesquite Creek expansion.

“He knew if he talked to any other officials, their necks were on the line from the people opposing Post Oak, so he wouldn't have gotten anywhere (building a consensus),” she said Tuesday. “Before he was there, for five years Waste Management was dumping in Guadalupe County and it produced no money.”

Yet Jones himself spoke out against landfills in the primary campaign even while negotiating behind the scenes, recalled Kutcsher.

Denying he'd taken a specific campaign position on the Post Oak project, Jones summarized his stump message as, “I'm against all landfills in my county.”

At the March 31 meeting, Jones recalled how he'd persuaded Waste Management Vice President Don Smith to start paying the county by suggesting he curtail the 7.5 percent fees to Comal County and New Braunfels.